STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE (15) ***
DIRECTED BY: ERROL MORRIS SINCE they first emerged in the world's media in 2004, the photographs of prisoner abuses perpetrated by the US military at Abu Ghraib have, according to document
ary-maker Errol Morris, become the most viewed images in the history of the medium.
Almost as shocking for the callous theatricality of their composition as they are for the visual record they provide of the obvious pain, distress and humiliation being inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners featured in them, one of Morris's missions in his new, lavishly produced documentary Standard Operating Procedure, is to examine the problematic nature of these photographs: to interrogate not only what they exposed, but also what they covered up.
As Morris sees it, photos such as the one of grinning soldier Lynndie England leading a prisoner around on a dog leash, or that infamous shot of a hooded prisoner known only as "Gilligan" standing on a box with fake electrical wires attached to his fingers, may appear to reveal the widespread practice of torture, but focusing solely on what is in the pictures obscures some of the more worrying implications their very existence throws up. In other words, while a picture is worth a thousand words, it sometimes tells only half a story.
To fill in the blanks then, Morris uses his Interrotron – a camera that allows his subjects to look at a video image of him while they're talking into his camera – to interview five of the seven "bad apples" that Pentagon officials blamed, and later convicted, for perpetrating these prisoner abuses. (The other two, including alleged ringleader Charles Graner, are still in jail). To further help us get inside their heads he also stages epic reconstructions involving swooping helicopters and mortar attacks that wouldn't look out of place in a Michael Bay film, and deploys some elaborate CG imagery as well as a score by Tim Burton's regular collaborator Danny Elfman.
What emerges is a slick, polished film that offers up a portrait of a group of soldiers who were mostly young, naïve, and easily corrupted by both the dehumanising nature of combat and the ambiguous nature of the Bush administration's directives concerning the War on Terror.
That at least is how they position themselves as they relate their involvement in the scandal. One of the most disturbing things about Standard Operating Procedure is the way almost all of them display a complete absence of remorse over what they did. Instead they repeatedly pass the buck, blaming, among other things, the highly-charged patriotic atmosphere; the stress of being under constant mortar attack and the pressure to help deliver results by "softening up" detainees for interrogation. Ultimately it all boils down to the old Nuremberg Defence: they were only following orders.
But whose orders? That's the question Morris's film frustratingly never gets to grips with beyond delving into the legal and semantic arguments regarding the definition of torture. It's made clear, for instance, that those arguments came from further up the command chain. The most chilling moment in the film occurs when Brent Pack – the analyst officially assigned to interpret the contents of the photos – outlines why the aforementioned picture of the prisoner with electric wires attached to his fingers was considered an example of standard operating procedure rather that actual torture.
Yet still Morris prefers to implicate rather than indict – which is all very well, except the collective testimonies of his subjects, while sometimes undeniably fascinating, never really builds to anything substantial. Morris is surprisingly easy on them, perhaps to reinforce the point that questioning people under duress doesn't necessarily elicit useful information. But nor does giving people enough rope to hang themselves when the subject refuses to tie a noose around their neck. Having already gone through the legal wringer, Morris's interviewees are far too cautious to do that again.
But Standard Operating Procedure does throw up some useful (and bizarre) insights into the story behind those pictures, and even if some of it is hard to accept – there's a jaw-dropping moment when Sabrina Harman, who insists she began taking the photos to expose the abuses, explains why she appears in one of them giving a thumbs-up sign next to a corpse – they do go some way to illustrating the mindset of those involved.
Other films, most notably Alex Gibney's recent, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, may offer up a more comprehensive, clear-headed and balanced overview of this issue, but for all Standard Operating Procedure's faults, Morris deserves some credit for refocusing attention on a set of images, the ubiquity of which risked robbing them of any real meaning.
The full article contains 795 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
